The Whirligig of Time: A Tale of Two Harrys

By Sean Currie

The Whirligig of Time
There's something not quite right about Harry Ambrose.
As winter approaches on a dreary London night in 1963, a mysterious man tells his strange story.
According to his colleagues, for the past eight years Harry has lived a boring, predictable life dedicated to the library department of a learned scientific society.
But there's another Harry, one with shocking credentials. It's his past, filled with sins and blunders, that has crushed his hope of redemption. He suffers serious psychological damage inextricably linked to his former life.
Will Harry survive this tumultuous year in London?
Who's following him, and why?
Will he find escape in the affection of a young lady?
Throughout Harry's story, he struggles to understand and resolve his destructive personal shortcomings, the intimacy of death, an overriding sense of hopelessness and corruption. Like a whirligig – a child's spinning toy – will time resurrect to attain revenge?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667832739

Book preview

one

Having served my country for so long, I often forget what service really means. Having considered the subject a while, I concluded the concept is ambiguous. We all recognize the image of young, uniformed men marching to the front, but duty can also be enigmatic. As an illustration, I recounted the odd, but true, story of Harold Ambrose one night, showing how redemption and intrigue make even the purest assumptions perplexing. Furthermore, the making of past events whole again takes time and pain, which may be just as noteworthy.

⁎⁎⁎⁎

You might recall The Army & Navy Club, one of London’s finest. The muscular, seven-story building stood on the corner of Pall Mall and St. James’s Square, in a colorlessly affluent area of Westminster, across from the Royal Automobile Club. The four of us enjoyed the Club, our sense of tribe, our place to belong, I suppose. Our church was the hub of our world reality, a haven of truth, far from the hysteria of Westminster, where we basked in our annual martial camaraderie.

As that December night grew misty, the weather enshrouded the building, as all others, in a cozy blanket of chill, mixing with the steamy speech bubbles of conversation. It emerged as downy gray to embrace us all, forming a cocoon until the heat returned and the colors of nature were free to flutter again. The streets yawned in each direction, visible until invisible, with only the pillar box and blurry, sizzling streetlamps to break the view between buildings so tall the tops disappeared in the swirling folds of the night. The air smelled of nothing but the damp river. Absent the fumes of traffic, its fragrance resembled a meadow lacking a vestige of grass.

I had been a member for several years, as had my two English companions. The fourth man was a retired Soviet officer, Commander Borysko Koval, an honorary member of the highest reputation, who this year replaced a fond French colleague who had passed away. Paix à son âme. Not one of us, the Russian, but we admired his nation’s sacrifice two decades before, and we had witnessed the decorations padding his chest. Time had come for this old warrior to find some peace or serve his homeland in another capacity.

It wasn’t a pea-souper of a fog, just a misdemeanor, this one. I remember the last serial killer back in fifty-two, which may have taken twelve thousand lives: coughing and choking on the remnants of cheap coal and filthy diesel. God made our business trivial in comparison. The weather unsettled the eternal city, declared motionless, the roads made discreet by the industrial action of London’s hackney carriage drivers; their taxis idle, like corpses in the grave.

Our visiting Soviet comrade was a wide-shouldered man, with a strong, square face and high cheekbones. He returned to the table as we three affectionately watched him approach. He appeared only half nautical tonight, liberated of uniform, but found himself in the same predicament of the gloomy, brooding city. He expressed his grasp of the circumstances in his deep, gravelly voice; Damn the taxi drivers. I just confirmed with Alfred, only buses are moving, and I will not climb aboard one of your red monsters.

We embraced between us the bond of military service. Martin, an ex-Brigadier—the oldest, most admired, and most virtuous of us—sat next to me. He had commanded the 23rd Armoured Brigade in North Africa and was decorated for acts of conspicuous gallantry against the enemy. A waiter collected the final cutlery and asked if we might enjoy a special brandy tonight. As the Commander retook his seat, the retired Major, William, his sunken cheeks, and yellow complexion turning more painful with the transport news, said: I jolly well hope they have a room left. He had crossed the Rhine with the Black Watch in March forty-five, but despondency clung to him like a long, wet coat tonight.

I booked one. You had better confirm, William. There will be a rush tonight, said the Brigadier.

Can someone give me a lift to Charing Cross? the Major asked.

It’s a ten- or fifteen-minute walk, William, I reminded him.

In this weather? With my leg? I sympathized. He had attained an age and given immeasurably all those years that finally some modicum of comfort was due. Isn’t that the least we all deserve?

The Brigadier returned from a brief glance out the window, watching the mist—filled with smudgy lights—clothing the exterior in a benign, radiant fabric. Let’s adjourn to the smoking room and celebrate with a good cognac. My treat, gentlemen.

The old river, whence the gloom had spread, as it had for centuries, held the city in its grip, embracing the inhabitants—as always—by its centrifugal force, drawing ever more people to the center. This venerable stream, someone called it, the argent waterway acting as a robust, silvery wall, separating the city’s north from south, just like the recently built one in Berlin separated the new East and West. The river would ebb and flow as the night advanced, while the roads lay silent like a tide, slack and hesitant. On this river, great armies left and returned, led or conveyed by the forefathers of the three Englishmen at the table. They might have found the wishes of men, the seed of nations, or the disease of empires. But the four of us, earnest modern military men, were bound in combat not so long ago. We were all vanquishers. But had our victories, our power, our strength, arisen from the weakness of others? Combat, we can assume, is more perplexing than that. Even more so now the war had turned cold, like a frigid night’s death had infected our mortal souls. In 1963, war was no longer noble.

We sauntered together into the smoking room, found a corner table and relaxed in the more comfortable leather chairs, with the gentle background conversations like the hum of deep-voiced, murmuring bees. The others unpacked their cigars while Commander Koval invited me to share a story I had alluded to when we met in West Germany a few months earlier. I have some reputation for reciting a listenable yarn, and tonight seemed an appropriate opportunity. Come, Peter, my friend, tell us a story, factual and sinister. Something from your line of devious work. What happened to that man…Primrose was his name?

The waiter arrived and placed four snifters and a bottle of Premier Reserve—created by Felix Courvoisier’s progeny—on the table. Another server added a large plate of selected cheeses and the Commander signaled I should begin. We sat in a square near one of the wood fires they used to heat the room, creating an agreeable atmosphere. The weather had made the city darker than dark this evening, like one of those bleak paintings by Walter Sickert, where the viewer is unsettled by the goings-on. How apt for the subject at hand, a story whose details had trickled through to me over an extended period. I thought it appropriate I relate the story the Commander had requested, the dark and complicated matter of Harold Ambrose. I judged it curious our Soviet acquaintance had chosen this tale and then deliberately mispronounced his name. I have functioned in a specialized department of the military, trained long ago to notice these tiny imponderables of life. As a caveat, you should learn sometimes to disregard what I say; I know I do.

I began with a tone-setting generalization after watching the satisfying glug of dark amber fall into the delicate, yet Rubenesque crystal. After the War ended in forty-five, I encountered several men I knew before who had become machines of the modern workplace, disconnected units in the corporate world, valued only for their machine-like efficiency. Many returned to a society that had earlier shaped them, and now found their new-taught capabilities burdensome. They turned jittery and disturbed from suppressing the rage, burying it deep so they might awake each morning to repeat the tedious commute to drudgery, one arm high, hanging on the leather straps, counting each joint in the steel line. Fear drove the mills where these men worked. After becoming anxious parents and oppressive spouses, they piled damage upon damage until their home life collapsed. What remained was a bitter, confused, and resentful shell of what had been before. They looked the same, a little fitter and sturdier, perhaps a year or two older, but combat had altered them beyond recognition inside.

Harold Ambrose was unlike those men. He was an enigma, for sure, but the impossible moral quandaries of battle had marked him in another way; in a manner in which I thought the nation might value his continued service. He had more reasons to be embittered than most, but he hid it inside, like a simmering caldera waiting to vent.

I ought to apprise you of his demeanor first. Outwardly, he was an ordinary chap, and no one would remember Harry’s personality in pastel-hued colors. Mediocrity personified, some might say. Occasionally, he could be interesting and benevolent, although most often not. Habitually, he was bleak and despondent. In exceptional circumstances, he could be cold and ruthless. Oh! And one other thing, his name wasn’t Harold Ambrose.

two

The suggestion for the story had stemmed from our Soviet friend. I admit that created suspicion in my mind, but there are many ways to recite a tale. He proposed I should condense the story and achieve a succinct conclusion, but we were imprisoned here for the evening and we each enjoyed the Club’s spiritous fare. Besides, what kind of raconteur abridges a good narrative? Since Homer, all storytellers have emphasized one maxim, and I saw no obvious alternative: I would start at the beginning.

⁎⁎⁎⁎

Harold Ambrose (let me call him ‘Harry,’ since I know he prefers that sobriquet) remembered his early childhood in British Malaya with mixed feelings. The influence of parents upon their children is an accepted indicator of the mammalian world, and Harry was no exception. The symptoms parents vaccinate us with can last a lifetime, but they can’t always supply the elixir of affection. His father owned a palm plantation about twenty miles west of Ipoh, the royal capital, home of the Sultan of Perak, in the District of Kuala Kangsar. A vibrant tropical rainforest and equatorial climate permeated the boy’s upbringing; hot and humid, with predictable afternoon rain showers. You know, the tropical kind; drenching without refreshing. A mix of servants, tutors, and gardeners raised Harry in an ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse extended family. He lived a life of childhood recreation, guided by his Malay nanny, Aisha, and learned English (without an accent) as his first language. He spoke the local Malay dialect well and cultivated an understanding of Mandarin. Beside the plantation spread an idyllic landscape full of monkeys, hornbills, flowerpeckers, and sunbirds. Within hiking distance, he could encounter bats, flying squirrels, lemurs, antelope, Asian elephants, macaques, gibbons, and more. The jungle lay beyond the open grassland. It was primitive and off-limits, where few trod alone in the darkness. In the distance were eruptive masses which formed the background hills and mountain ranges, like shadows on a fair, sunlit landscape. British Malaya, in the 1920s, was a picturesque place to endure a classic colonial upbringing with English-born parents.

But young Harry lacked an all-embracing relationship with those parents. His father was a man who believed in the Empire and grew pessimistic about its decline. The palm oil business occupied his time, often requiring travel to Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. At home, he had limited occasions for any emotional relationship with his wife or son. Harry could recall only a handful of meaningful conversations over the years. Neither did he understand his mother’s strange moods, because he hardly imagined the insidious damage of excessive alcohol. He endured comfortably, without understanding, in a dysfunctional family. The phrase was unknown in the twenties, and so his instinctive inclination towards hugs, kindness, and love existed only in Aisha and the family’s pet dog. His parent’s acknowledgement of him as a golden only-child had, initially, been comforting, then meaningless. Finally, it came at an enormous cost to young Harry.

The ability to love and empathize is innate to everyone, but it must be maintained. Aisha, as splendidly affectionate as she was, could not fill the void. Economically, though, their only child lived a better life than they had endured a generation before, as his father proved a competent entrepreneur. As both heroes and villains, the improved fiscal life made a convincing argument that his stiff, awkward parents had fulfilled their basic commitment to their child. Perhaps they had, but Harry, as he developed, would return nothing virtuous to the world. In their small way, they had contributed naught to the larger society they occupied because they lacked that basic component of parenthood; affection.

In later life, he could recite the reasons they abandoned him with emotional scars and pain. He recognized the inherited trauma of his junior years lingered in the room when he thought of them. In reflective moments, Harry considered the possibilities of love, family, and children. They flickered through his mind like water quenching a flame, a fork in the road to a better life he never took. There were times he craved the opportunity and environment to pursue a bold, new route, but it never came. A traumatic brain may discover self-reflection and self-improvement, a chance to learn how to care for others. But it required the cage door of pain be flung wide and a new world beckon him to venture outside. Harry knew this could never happen; the door had been locked closed somewhere along his journey.

After the early years of home-schooling, at the tender age of ten, in 1931, his expatriate parents—against all his immature, shrieking doggedness—shipped him across the world to the torment of the English public school system. His life of privileged circumstance over, his future turned to a kind of beastliness as he joined the five percent of the population who attended this love-barren system. Harry had rarely seen his parents during the intervening school years. His only familial sustenance being an eccentric grandmother called Betty in Maidenhead whom he visited on school holidays.

The Haberdashers’ Aske’s’ School educated boys only, aged five to eighteen. It nestled in the bucolic countryside of Hampstead, northwest London, an area known for intellectuals, artists and nascent political activism. Upon his arrival at prep school, the dearth of biodiversity had astonished him; the trees forsaken as they dropped their leaves in autumn. The local wildlife suffered a limited variety; badgers, hedgehogs, house mice and manic gray squirrels, while God had constrained the woodlands to poplars, oaks and sycamores. Winter had been a momentous shock.

For a child, the school dimensions appeared vast, the ceilings towering, the surfaces hard stone, dead timber and iron. He memorialized the smell of old English wood, starched linen and pipe smoke for the rest of his life. Disoriented, he yearned for his tropical existence. Affected by the English allergies of spring, he experienced victimization from those who misunderstood his maladies, but he grew to love the English summer with a feral passion. All the while he abhorred the system his parents had thrown him into, along with the prison-style isolation from the world outside.

In the United Kingdom, ‘public’ schools are one of the splendid ironies of society, because they exclude the general population. They charge fees, are governed by an elected board of governors and avoid many of the regulations applying to their state-funded cousins. For centuries, the public schools and their alumni have maintained a class war against the lesser peoples. Eton College, their most distinguished exemplar, and its famous compatriots—Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Radley, Westminster—were formed for altruistic reasons long ago. But then they transformed into endowment-hungry institutions and opened to selected students only. They became private and elite. To confuse anyone paying attention, they retained the moniker of ‘public.’

As young Harry learned, these schools created a class culture unknown to most nations. Haberdashers, a boarding school, separated young children from their parents to, expectantly, shape them into members of an elite. A cripplingly shy Harry, with a slight stutter, like others, endured the loss of his family with emotional austerity; distancing himself from any feelings of love or empathy. He wet his bed, blubbered through the night, and suffered the consequences. But one of the school’s primary functions was the tempering of young boys. No one had sympathized with his crying, and as he grew older, Harry felt no need to support others when he witnessed them howling in despair. Survival required a hardening of his regular human softness, a severe disconnect from emotions and sensitivity. He endured the tired and lifeless food, and a bizarre veneration of old pupils who had died in the nineteenth century, fallen like dead leaves on the highway of battle. The school discouraged friendship between boys out of a grotesque fear of forbidden homosexuality. So many boys, isolated and unable to connect with humans, were encouraged instead to invest their loyalty in the school, and the system itself; a charmless cartoon of self-repression.

Bullying was not just endemic, but structural in the thirties, and newly distressing after the tender years in Malaya. Harry and the other young boys acted as servants for the older ones, fulfilling menial tasks like making beds and brewing cups of tea, and enduring whatever punishments their teen overlords contemplated. Their reward was knowing they could exact the same themselves in the future. They promised they wouldn’t, but they all did. The system was called ‘fagging,’ and dated back centuries. The fag-master became the benefactor of his fags and responsible for their happiness and moral conduct, while they fawned like dumb, neglected lap dogs embracing the emotional manipulation.

In his fourth year, at the sensitive age of fourteen, Harry—a good looking pubescent boy with an almost feminine complexion—encountered the classic child grooming strategies of the pedophile, including the invading of personal boundaries, which led to incremental touching. The abuser was a music teacher named Webb, who openly discussed the relative merits of boys as vehicles for adult pleasure. The boys, ignorant of sexual abuse notions, were taught to trust and respect. The confusion aided Webb in ogling the cold baths like a home supporter at the morning game. He touched and forced reciprocation against the obvious will of his victims. Harry concluded there was little point in reporting the abuse, and so failed to ease the embarrassing carnal situations in which he occasionally found himself entrapped.

The duties imposed on Harry, the time taken, and his general treatment became more mundane as the years passed and he progressed through adolescence. Haberdashers was mired in the quicksand of its own bizarre traditions. The school encouraged games and the tyranny of athleticism, as a way of exhausting the young body and eradicating any dangerous tendencies like gentleness, kindness, and affection. For generations, these schools had guaranteed exclusivity and loyalty through elaborate codes and rituals. Those strictly controlled networks could sustain a graduate throughout his life, but in the short term, a parent’s investment profited with an improved possibility of entrance to either Oxford or Cambridge. From there, they were furnished with a clear path to ruling the Empire. The reason to attend a public school was to say you had gone to a public school.

The young men of these schools finally left after suffering the bullying, the sexual abuse and the guilt, as extremely effective colonial servants, like minor gangsters in a system run by an anonymous godfather. They demanded comparable submissiveness and loyalty from the native populations that England sent them to rule, having been taught to view others as unruly children in need of discipline. They were sent out into the Empire and, if so ordered, could organize a massacre of the indigenous with numbing regularity. Only the Africans and Indians suffered. It also meant they could treat the lower social orders at home without concern for the results. For many years, Britain had been governed by a framework of seriously damaged people. But Harry never forgot the physical abuse and the other—personal—violations.

He endured the system, bounded by the narrow fences of existence, fighting its effects for the rest of his life. Since English children were taught to hide their emotions, feelings, and desires, he did so with skill. He remained aloof and detached, while he gained his milk-monitor badge, prefect tie, rugby colors and a mastery of a useless, classical language. His only valuable skill was an ability to identify the faults of others who survived the system. Once he left, he could spot another early-boarder from far afield. He could see and smell the corruption dripping from them like perspiration. Silence protected the arrangement, the cornerstone of the English vice of snobbery. Because public schools had been so effective in molding a child’s character, an assault on the school grew into a charge on all those who had passed through it, and was rarely tolerated.

Those intelligent enough to see it likened elitism in Britain to the worst kind of social engineering. They educated one in seven members of the senior judiciary at just five schools. Britain, even by 1963 when I recited this tale, was profoundly elitist, with those educated at public school effortlessly progressing through higher education, creating a closed shop of cabinet posts, permanent secretaries, diplomats, newspaper columnists, BBC executives, members of parliament and senior armed forces officers. This was the public school’s primary purpose, to groom upper-class boys to become the administrators of the Empire and Commonwealth. They instilled an unshakeable confidence and sense of superiority in their pupils, as members of the best class of the best nation in the world. Every classroom had a map of the world drenched in pink; the British Empire. In return, they demanded unswerving loyalty and a willing submission to a rigid hierarchy. But the system—The Establishment—had seen the future coming, like the light from the new diesel trains heading towards them in a tunnel.

Harry lived at school on the fringes of London without being part of the big city. He grew up, not realizing he’d attended a ‘minor’ public school until he progressed into the real world. Before that, he thought Haberdashers could hold its head high with the best of them. As far as the Etonians were concerned, however, his school was so obscure and worthless, he might have attended a shabby comprehensive. For Etonians, the other classes were anonymous. They were subtle about their snobbery, asserting their superiority with tiny signifiers, and their weapons-grade charm. Being so grand, they hardly looked down on others, rather they felt awkward for you: Such a pity, you poor chap, you didn’t have the education we did…

As the years slipped by, the more self-defeating and foolish Harry recognized it was to wish things had been different. As a teenager, the nights became lonelier, and absent the female sex, frustration and desperation set in. He was an unworldly, troubled boy, and no one seemed to notice. The alternative he needed was one in which training, and determination were more important than social connectivity. Cold baths, early morning runs, beatings, and fagging were inflicted upon him, but without the status they usually brought upon graduation. His life had been mistreated at an early age by the mere fact of being a boy, hurting him at home and at school, where they despised his foolishness and allergies. The experience made him the man he became, his own man, happy in his skin, saying what he thought and never compromising his principles.

Times were changing and economic pressure prevailed on the upper class as depression, then war, had swept the world. He realized that a ruling class in a state of perpetual suppression is a menacing situation. Anger was the only emotion school had gifted him, and he left with the knowledge of being different, and possessing a deep dislike of the elite.

And he never forgot Mr. Webb.

A taste for violence and an obsession with hierarchy also work well to prepare boys for the military. Critics of public schools have argued instead their obsession with militarism—absorbed by generations of prime ministers and generals—has in fact, often goaded the country into war and prolonged the bloodshed, most ruinously during The Great War of 1914. The generals directed from their chateaus, while the men fought ankle-deep in mud. Eton lost more graduates than any other school in that one, but that was expected. The British Army, led by an Old Harrovian, simply reproduced civilian class hierarchies, installing public schoolboys as officers with command over hundreds of working-class men whose existence was as foreign to them as those of the African villagers their forefathers subjugated. A disproportionate number of those aristocratic boys, including the Prime Minister’s son, died with such high zest in the fighting for the nihilistic, vaguely classical ethos that death in battle would be the most noble end to their lives. Dulce et decorum est, as the poet said.

three

People with troubled childhoods often have a fractious time adjusting to maturity. The early years should be a launchpad for the innate talents and joys of young adulthood in a good and just world. But boyhood trauma is more than a narrative; it’s a biological time-bomb, a waste of talent, and a long-term health hazard. Harry Ambrose was still young and innocent when he finished school in 1939, just before the trumpets blew and Europe drifted headlong toward catastrophe again. Harry missed the jingoistic radio speeches, the bands and Union Flag bunting draped across suburban roads. Although accepted to Oxford, he deferred enrollment for a year to visit his parents in Singapore with the hope of rebuilding the family unit into something partially cohesive. He coveted the plantation and home again, but Aisha had passed away. Grandmother Betty was sad to see him leave England. Until that moment, her life had been a sunny afternoon that passed quickly and was soon forgotten, like all the other days lacking drama or excitement. She had enjoyed his occasional company.

He was eager to encounter new cultures, learn new languages and visit the vast unexplored land of his dreams; before they changed into nightmares. The world lay unfolded before him like the open palm of his hand, while the sensation of freedom he felt leaving school was palpable. He had matured enough to understand life would not begin one day; this was it happening right now. His time in this place was ending. He was entering the summer of his life rather than the autumn of North London. His years stretched out before him, like untrodden paths into the mist, with a destination unknown and thrilling. He caught the rays of light that streamed through the already yellowed leaves. One day, he would sit under a mango tree in the Caribbean, or under an olive tree in Italy, or in a meadow in Malaya. It was a befitting time of life to have dreams.

The now old woman, his grandmother, sat and listened to the excitement in his voice. The times